


Take My Hand

by silvertonedwords (emily31594)



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-10
Updated: 2019-08-10
Packaged: 2019-10-25 09:51:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,033
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17722904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/emily31594/pseuds/silvertonedwords
Summary: Take My Hand: Tina stretches and turns over in bed. Despite the hour, she is somehow not tired enough to fall back asleep. Instead she settles against the pillows and watches Newt in the dim moonlight...Tina, few words, and the spaces that Newt's touch fills.Her Eyes: Tina rests, and Newt tries to imagine her eyes.





	1. Chapter 1

_Prompted by **katiehavok**._

* * *

 

Tina stretches and turns over in bed. Despite the hour, she is somehow not tired enough to fall back asleep. Instead she settles against the pillows and watches Newt in the dim moonlight. His hair is a mess of curls, his brow slightly furrowed in sleep, his deep breaths and occasional murmurings loud in the quiet room. She gives in to the urge to brush a curl from his forehead.

They have been married only a week, but his features have long been as familiar to her as her own. As has his voice: his easy banter with his creatures; the stubborn push of his words in defending them; the shaking, gentle force of his empathy; and the way joy makes his words tremble.

Newt sighs and resettles in his sleep, and Tina breathes out a soft laugh to see the sheets tangle further around him. She has pulled on cotton pajamas, but Newt is still bare, the outlines of several scars visible beneath the cream fabric.

His body is not yet as familiar as his face and his voice, but it is becoming so.

(They’d both been nervous, not sure where to start.

 _Have you slept here before?_ she’d asked of the sparse bedroom with its neatly made bed and heavy curtains. They’d hovered in the doorway, Newt tugging at his bowtie as Tina unfastened and pulled off her shoes.

 _Yes. Er, a few times. I think_ , he’d said, looking a bit lost as he glanced at her.

She’d paused, thinking, and reached for him. _Take my hand_.

And she’d drawn them both back to the menagerie and the shed, his touch grounding her with each step.)

Tina smiles. The memories from that night are so easy to touch. His trembling, eager hands; her breath stuttering from her lungs; his gasps pressed into her neck; her hand searching out and grasping his.

She finds his hand now, resting on the sheets between them. The moonlight glints off the smooth surface of his wedding band. On his palm she sees a scar that she has felt many times as his hand grazed her cheek or brushed over her arm. She pauses a moment, then reaches out to trace it.

 _Tina_ , he’d whispered gruffly the first time she made a study of his hands and their scars. The heat in his eyes and the press of his pulse against her thumb had felt intimate then. This touch feels even more so now. She hadn’t quite been able to imagine a week ago that they would feel even closer now, when they had been so close already.

Her finger moves from his palm to his wrist, tracing the mottled skin of a burn mark that wraps from inner wrist to outer.

When had she first noticed his hands?

At the docks, perhaps, when he’d touched her hair? Her eyes had been on his, but she had felt the way the touch mirrored everything about him. Hesitant, purposeful, gentle.

But no, she thinks, fingers sliding along the back of his hand to his knuckles, it had been earlier. She had seen his hands restrained behind him at MACUSA and had watched them turn white as he’d tried desperately to protect his creatures. _They’re not dangerous. They aren’t dangerous._ His hands had trembled as he’d watched the floating image of the obscurus, and he had twisted his fingers together nervously in the cell as she’d apologized about his creatures and he’d explained about the little girl in the Sudan. That had been the first time she’d truly seen him. His empathy, and his loneliness.

Or perhaps she’d caught a glimpse of it even earlier, when he’d gripped the chair in the apartment and stumbled through an awkward dinner almost silently. Perhaps that was when she’d first wondered if they might be just a little bit similar.

She shakes her head.

Two years ago, after Paris, he had hidden himself away in his case. After hardly seeing him for two days, she had climbed into the space for the first time since she had been there with him and Leta. His red-rimmed eyes had caught hers, with his hand extended toward her, and had fluttered shut when their skin had touched. She’d imagined it so often, in the months when they’d been separated by the Atlantic. His hands scrawling out the pages of his letters, or even typing the pages of the book she’d kept beside her bed, surrounded by creatures in his case, his clothing a little mussed and his hands sun-tanned and freckled as she always remembered him. (And sometimes, after Queenie had fallen asleep, she’d trace the letters and imagine him reading hers, and wonder what it might be like for his hands to hold hers again, as they had when they’d run from MACUSA. But this time not to catch her, or to pull her along at a run. This time, merely because he wanted to.)

Tina breathes out a nearly silent laugh. She’d been so _angry_ at him, and yet so desperate to see him again. She hadn’t let herself imagine, as she’d knelt on the floor beside an unconscious Kama and passed Newt his wand, her dark, hurt, yearning eyes fixed on him, that he had traced the ink of her letters and wondered the same. Had not let herself think that as they knelt beside each other in Flamel’s house, he had also been painfully, blissfully aware of their near and often brushing hands.

The rush of tenderness chokes her even now, to remember him dropping his wand in the records room, his fingers fumbling with the photograph from the newspaper.

“You can thank the niffler for that one.” Tina blinks and looks up, her thumb resting over a small bite mark at the juncture of his thumb and first finger. “Although it was an accident. I think.” His voice is rough with sleep, his eyes intently fixed on hers.

Tina looks down at their hands as they each touch and trace absently.

“Are my hands so very interesting?”

Tina smiles, teeth digging into her lip.

He lifts her hand and his lips brush her knuckles. Then he rests her hand against his chest, his thumb stroking the back of her hand.

It has always taken her breath away to see him with his creatures. The way he touches each differently; the language he shares with them as he eases their fears and prepares their food and soothes their injuries, his hands sometimes gentle and sometimes firm, his fingers capable of delicacy or strength, but always kind.

“What?” he murmurs, and she realizes that she has been staring.

She leans closer to kiss him. Her fingers curl into his chest, and his hand moves from hers to touch her cheek, then her shoulders, her back, pressing her closer.

When they break apart, she rests her forehead on his, sighing happily at the way the pads of his fingers graze her skin. She has not answered his question, at least not in speaking, but the words _I love you_ seem so inadequate for the warmth that fills her chest when she looks at him. He closes his eyes, leaning into her, and she knows he understands.

They are developing their own silent language. Tina takes his hand, twining their fingers together. She cannot wait to watch it grow.

 


	2. Her Eyes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Tina rests, and Newt tries to imagine her eyes.

_For **njckle** , who was very kind about Take My Hand. This is Newt's companion piece._

Newt rubs a hand down his face, trying to blink the sleep from his eyes. A glance at his pocket watch confirms he’s only slept for an hour or so. St. Mungo’s is eerily silent at this hour, the moonlight stark against Tina’s white sheets. Newt isn’t particularly used to silence.

He’s a rational man when it comes to medicine and bodily injury. He does look after injured creatures rather frequently, after all. The healers have told him she’ll be conscious by morning, and well enough to return home in a few days. 

Somehow, waiting at her sickbed with no treatment left to be performed, he’s lost that thread of his own medical knowledge.

Tina’s going to wake up, and she’s going to be fine.

He still wants her to wake. He wants to see her dark eyes again, alight with her kindness and her fire. He’d told her once that photographs don’t do them justice. Neither do his sketches in the margins of his notebooks. His imagination may come closer, but even that cannot capture their fiery, depthless pull.

Point is, he really needs to see them again.

She’s tucked neatly into the plain hospital sheets, her bandaged arm resting over her stomach. He touches her hair beside her eyes, smiling softly. Her voice is easy enough to conjure. The teasing sternness, or trembling warmth. Her fierce, low insistence in defense of anything or anyone she’s trying to protect.

But her eyes, he thinks, his eyes falling shut as he tries to picture them. 

How had they seemed to him when they first met?

He searches for a glimpse, but there is not particular memory to find. At least not right away.

There’d been a sort of pull, a  _something_  that he couldn’t explain or perhaps even describe.

He searches over the memories.  _And you are?_ and  _I’m takin’ you in._ The first time he recalls really  _choosing_ to look into her eyes had been on the stairs to the sisters’ flat.  _Always alone, Mrs. Esposito_ , she’d said, and he’d looked behind him to find his gaze momentarily met with hers, sheepish as though Newt hearing that admission made some sort of vulnerability inside her wobble. He remembers thinking that he hadn’t really  _looked_  at her until that moment. It had reminded him of something he’d perhaps forgotten in his year abroad in the company of many creatures but few humans. Beasts may roar or snap or snarl, but no species, no creature, from the tiniest bird to the largest, fiercest dragon, thinks itself impervious. Tina had reminded him in her shaken exterior on those stairs, and again in her glances at dinner, that people are the same.

The thought had occupied him for several minutes at that table. That other people—most people, perhaps—feel out of place. Perhaps not exactly like him, but then no two creatures are exactly the same, and yet a technique he uses to calm a frightened hippogriff might, with some modification, work just as well on a kneazle. Even former aurors who stop strangers on the street and call his book an extermination guide might hide much complexity under that surface.

A few days later, sitting on a stool in his case with a steaming cup of tea, she would apologize for what she did next, for turning his creatures in to MACUSA. He hadn’t needed to hear the words again, spoken earnestly and yet quietly, as though they might not be believed. He also hadn’t known how to explain that he’d never blamed a creature for following its instincts. And certainly that’s what she’d done, too wrapped up in her own knowledge and goals and good intentions to understand. He’d seen her momentary uncertainty when he and Jacob climbed out of the case and into MACUSA. He’d seen the disbelief and betrayal and horror in her eyes when they were arrested, and her pained empathy for the image of the man who died at the hands of the obscurus. Her eyes had been all bright and sad and earnest in the cell when she first apologized. That night, in his case, with the tea and her warm voice and his departure looming, he’d simply looked into her vulnerable eyes and said, in what he hoped was a kind and steady voice that conveyed the depth of his understanding and put her worries to rest, “I know.”

They’d sat in an almost comfortable silence, then, until the niffler had hobbled over to Tina, and she’d chatted with and teasingly scolded the creature until he looked quite pleased with himself for having won her admiration.

And Newt had wondered, watching them, if it was normal for his chest to feel the way it did when he looked at her.

When Grindelwald had questioned them and brought up his expulsion from Hogwarts and drawn out the obscurus, it had been Tina’s eyes he’d sought. Tina who he’d wanted to convince, because the idea of her thinking that he would deliberately harm anyone for the sake of his work…that had been intolerable. Merlin, the way she’d looked at him, as though deciding whether to believe it. Other people could think of him what they would, but to have  _her…_ to have this person who…who…to have her think him dangerous or cruel or…for her to think that all his sharp edges and fumbled words hid cruelty and not uncertainty or loneliness or pain. 

 _She’s done nothing of the kind_ he’d told Graves at their joint sentence, his mind echoing with the words.  _No. No, not her. Not her, too_. There’s so much there, in her eyes, he’d wanted to say. She’s kind and fierce. She’s hurting. And he’d always helped hurting things.

She’d looked back at him from the edge of the pool, and he’d thought of her depthless eyes and her fear and how terribly young she looked. And perhaps, beneath all of that, a glimmer of trust. He’d hoped so.

He’ll never forget the way she looked at the images in the death potion, her eyes warm with love and then dark with anger. The determination that had filled her eyes despite her uncertainty when he’d asked her to jump. 

And then. The first time he’d held her. Their eyes meeting for a breath-stealing, heart-thudding moment, her legs sliding on the cell floor and bumping into his...

Sheets rustle. Newt startles and blinks, but it is only a healer come to check on his wife.

“She’ll be alright, Mr. Scamander,” Healer Lockwood says kindly. Newt’s lips turn into a tired, grateful smile. “Her right hand’s fine, if you’d like to hold it.”

Newt glances at the woman’s earnest face. He’d kissed Tina’s forehead and squeezed her hand when he’d arrived, but grasping her hand…touching her when she isn’t…if he lets himself want too much of it, he may not stay calm.

Still, he reaches for her good hand and cups it between his. His thumb glides across it. “I’ve been trying to imagine your eyes, love,” he tells her softly once the healer has left them. “It’s been far too many days since you left.” He swallows. “I still can’t manage it, I’m afraid.” He touches her temple, a whisper of contact. “I suppose I’ll have to look at them some more, hm? Important research.” He imagines the little quirk of her lips and perhaps the way she’d tease him for such a remark and bites his lip with a rueful smile. “When you’re awake, then.” He traces her hand with light fingertips. “Where was I? Oh, yes…”  _Well, I love it,_  and the glimpse he’d caught of her bright eyes tracking the swooping evil as they’d run with her hand in his.

The laughter dancing in her eyes at Dougal’s name, and then at his invisibility. The eagerness and excitement when she’d thought to track down Gnarlack. So eager in fact that she’d stepped closer to him and he’d found to his surprise that he hadn’t minded her there. Not like this, passionate and excited and determined to help his creatures. Not from someone whose gaze had filled with empathy for the obscurus and who loved his swooping evil.

The kindness in her eyes when he’d asked about the death potion and she’d spoken about Credence. The little glimpse of reticence as though she hadn’t done enough to help him. He’d found that he was not surprised to see it there at all. Tina. Kind. Of course.

Her wonder as she’d looked about the case a few minutes later. That hadn’t surprised him either, and not only because he cannot ever fathom why people don’t see his creatures for what they are. 

 _Fierce_  and kind, he’d thought as she crouched behind the overturned care and told Newt  _save him._

By the end of that day, she’d been a whole and complicated person to him, tender and fierce and wise and uncertain. Joyful and sad and curious and wondering.

And by the end of that week he’d had to all but tear himself away. Her eyes, he’d thought the night before his departure, were like Tina herself, and Tina was like a rainforest he’d not yet explored. Each layer so full of things to learn and see and explore that anything so short as a week must be utterly insufficient.

He’d tried his hand at a sketch on the ship home. Again and again, he’d striven to capture her shyness and humor and warmth and excitement and uncertainty on the docks. He’d tried to draw her wide and wondering eyes as they’d sought out his and he’d touched her hair. The likeness had never been exactly right.

A newspaper clipping had arrived a few weeks later with a short scrap of parchment clipped to the folded page.  _I thought you’d want a copy. Q._

He’d stared at the picture, smiling, and between the photograph and the handful of letters he’d collected in the past weeks in her neat hand, he’d been almost close to seeing her eyes.

Then her letters had stopped, and he’d grown more and more dissatisfied both with the inadequacies of the newspaper’s likeness and his inability to draw one himself.

 _Tina_  he remembers whispering as he traced the edges of the portrait, as though speaking her name might explain why she’d stopped. He’d found a salamander near his fireplace that night, and his hasty sketch while staring into its light had been closer than anything he’d managed in drawing her from memory. He’d hoped she’d understand the comparison.

Newt shifts in his hospital chair and strokes her hand. “I should’ve written to you again, hm? My stubborn Porpentina. You’ve no idea how much I wanted to. Well, perhaps you do now.” He reaches to delicately brush her hair from her forehead.

He’d known right away in the sewers of Paris that it must really be her, for although her apparition in the circus had walked away with her back to him,  _her_ eyes had been real and alive with everything the picture didn’t show.

There’d been new things to contend with as well. For although there had been passion and excitement there had also been a hardness lurking in her eyes that he hadn’t seen before. Their banter had been off, somehow, her eyes too firm when he’d caught a glimpse of them, then shifting away from him as though pushed away by their overlapping words and actions.

He’d known something was wrong, for she’d worked with him as easily as before, and yet looked away the moment it felt as though that work was melting them closer.

 _It was nice to see you again Mr. Scamander,_ she’d said, but her eyes had said something else. Had turned away as though it stung to let him study them the way he had those last few days in New York.

She’d teased him for the comment about the runespoor and crossed her arms, but her eyes had been light and amused and he’d smiled for having made them so. 

They’d come fully alive when she’d trapped Theseus and he’d thought that he’d very much like to keep that look. Forever perhaps.

 _Fiance_ , she’d said at the door to the records room, her eyes when he’d glimpsed them over bright. Is that what—

Her angry eyes had become confused, then forcedly patient. Perplexed. Surprised. Hopeful. And finally, finally on his, exposed again. Trusting. Tender, even. Like fire in dark water. He’d never wanted to stop looking.

 _Salamanders_ , she’d said, and if they hadn’t been interrupted, he might have stared at her eyes in wonder for much, much longer. So many people, the better he knows them, disappoint. Blinkered about creatures or perplexed, at best, by him. Not his Tina. The more he’s known her, the more he’s wanted. The more shades and colors he’s seen in her eyes. That’s not changed for a single day.

That night, she’d found him sitting at the base of a tree in the cemetery, nursing the niffler’s paw. She’d sunk onto the ground beside him. Her eyes, when he’d glanced at them, had been almost empty.

He hadn’t tried to find words, and neither had she.

The niffler, though, had reached out a little paw. Surprised, Tina had looked at him, and that was when her eyes had warmed, and then filled with tears.

 _You’ll come back?_ He’d said as they waited for her portkey several weeks later.

 _Yes_ , she’d promised. He’d tried again to notice all the things in her eyes that he would miss. And then he’d given in and touched her skin just below one eye. Her eyes had filled with that wondering sort of warmth that he now knows so well, though at the time he’d seen it only a handful of times.

And then she’d been gone.

On her next visit a couple of months later, she’d been writing a letter to book her trip back to New York, curled up in a chair in his sitting room while he tried to focus on a letter to his publisher and really kept looking at her. She’d glanced up just at the right time to see him.

“Stay,” he’d said without preamble, his eyes falling briefly to the floor and then plunging into her gaze, searching for all the things he’d not yet learned about them. “Please, stay.”

And she had.

Tina’s hand shifts in his. He looks to her face. She licks her lips, a hum passing over them as her brow furrows. And then her eyes open. Tired and raw with pain and the potions they’ve given her to control it. But there.

“Hello love. No, no don’t try to get up. You’re safe.” He shifts closer and she grips his hand.

She opens her mouth and her voice comes out as a croak. He points his wand at the cup beside her bed, helping her lift her head enough to take a sip. She tries again. “Those children?”

“The two little muggle girls. Oh, yes, perfectly alright, Theseus says. You saved their lives.”

“No-maj,” she croaks, and he laughs. He lifts her hand bundled between his to his lips.

He touches his knuckles beside her eye. She smiles at him. Her soul is there in her eyes. Warmth and generosity and fierceness and curiosity and wit. He still hasn't discovered everything in them.

He begins to tear up and her fingers stroke his chin.

“What have you been doin’, then?”

“Thinking,” he says, leaning forward to drop another kiss to her hand.

“About?” She twines their fingers together.

“You.”

She laughs, a soft, breathy sound with all her injuries. “Fascinating, I’m sure.”

He watches his finger twist in a lock of her hair. “Infinitely.”

That look again, the wonder and warmth. He hadn’t known what to call it on the docks in New York or when she’d left after Paris. But he does now. Love.

“Rest, love,” he murmurs as her eyes begin to flutter. She nods tiredly, her eyes already slipping shut. He still doesn’t know everything about her. He still cannot name each shadow that passes through her eyes, nor each light that brightens them. Her gaze can puzzle him, or takes his breath away, or makes his chest ache with tenderness, and sometimes he does not know why.

Kind, he’d thought, in the first days he’d known her. Fierce. Impassioned. He’s added so many words to that list since that day. He suspects he’ll never be satisfied, no matter how long it grows, that he’s described everything he sees in her dark and expressive eyes. What a pleasure it is, though, what an honor, to try.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I never know what to think about pieces like this...


End file.
